Recruitment marketing is an important concept for recruiters to attract today’s modern candidate. This concept involves utilizing marketing strategies to attract, engage and inform candidates to deliver a quality applicant. While you may already utilize some recruitment marketing tactics by posting jobs on social media or job boards, creating a comprehensive strategy is key to true success.
To jump start your recruitment marketing strategy, consider making these four goals a priority:
- Make potential candidates aware of your company and open positions
- Trigger their interest in your company, whether they’re actively looking for a job or are passive candidates
- Become their next employer of choice
- Drive high-quality talent to apply for open positions
Now that you’ve identified your benchmarks for your recruitment marketing, it’s time to get started. We’ve outlined 5 critical areas that should be part of any recruitment marketing plan:
Identify your employer brand
Without a clearly established employer brand, you won’t be able to attract the high-quality candidates you’re looking for. It’s important to make sure your brand communication efforts truly reflect your company’s culture, purpose, value and mission. Take the time to meet with your staff at every level (executives, managers and employees), to ensure you’ve given a thoughtful, purposeful review to who you are and what message you want to put out into the world. Your brand will be a critical component in every step of your recruitment marketing strategy.
Create target audience profiles
Before you start recruitment marketing, it’s important to identify your ideal candidates at every level. Recruiting for high-level positions could look very different than recruiting for hourly or part-time positions. Learning about each of your target groups to understand how they’re searching for jobs, what they want to gain and what motivates them when job searching or switching employers will be key in crafting recruitment marketing messaging.
Develop meaningful content
Once you’ve established a clear brand and target audience, it’s time to dive into the actual content you’ll be sharing. Examples of meaningful content include blog posts, social media posts and e-newsletters. Regardless of the medium, your content should remain consistent across all channels, but speak to each target market whenever possible. Consider the type of content you wish to create – are you a leading expert in the industry; do you want to provide creative or thought-provoking posts and articles? Don’t forget to always weigh content against your employer brand to ensure it’s genuine and authentic to who you are and what you stand for.
Content marketing will go far with both active and passive candidates as they’ll be inspired to authentically engage with your brand. By sharing content, candidates are able to gain insight into your company by what you have to say – which in turn will allow them to consider if they’re a right fit for your team.
Delve into digital advertising
Most companies don’t actively engage with digital advertising to promote both open jobs and created content. Digital ads on social media and Google are not only cost effective, but allow you to create hyper-targeted audience groups.
Digital advertising also allows you to easily track your ROI from ad through conversion if you have an online job application. You’ll also be able to gauge the quality of applicants if you set up separate campaigns with varying ad creative and target markets. Test out various platforms to see what works best for you. You may find that certain platforms produce more quality candidates compared to others.
Create personalized communication
Once you’ve effectively attracted your ideal candidate, it’s time to reach out. Personalizing communication efforts will show candidates that you care about them and their opinions. If they signed up for your email list, applied for a job or expressed some sort of interest in your company, it’s essential to follow up appropriately. Taking the time to authentically connect will go a long way for both active and passive candidates. Email or call them directly to discuss any open opportunities that may be a fit for them. If they live in the area, invite them out for coffee. Remember to be authentic in your engagement and do not focus too much on the recruitment or acquisition. It’s all about connections!